Posts Tagged ‘preview’

Sanctum 2 gets its fundamentals so right that everything else could suck and it’d still be a good game. Sanctum 2 is a tower-defense first-person shooter. Note the order of those genres; Sanctum 2 has a lot of shooting in it, but it’s not about the shooting. You can play with guns and lasers and [...]

The Showdown Effect is a sidescroller deathmatch multiplayer game from Paradox Interactive, inspired by Hong Kong–style and 1980s-era action movies. It’s currently in pre alpha stage, but it’s already one of my most pleasant surprises at PAX East 2012. It’s a two-player, mano-a-mano, fight to the death with a variety of weapons. Characters jump and [...]

I want to give Spec Ops: The Line the benefit of the doubt. This is a game that feels different from other shooters, and it’s striking out into some rare territory for the genre, but sadly it plays like every other shooter you’ve ever played. First the good: The game takes place in Dubai after [...]

Like Assassin’s Creed III, Max Payne 3 is a combination of the new and the familiar. It certainly plays like Max Payne 2. You earn bullet time by killing guys, and you earn more for special goals like head shots. You have a button that makes Max jump in bullet time, and one that just [...]

You know, it’s easy for a developer to piss off fans of an RPG franchise. All you need do is suggest — merely suggest — that you’ll be releasing a side-scrolling, hack-and-slash adventure version of the game, and your forums will light up like a Christmas tree. That’s what Lionhead Studios discovered when Fable fans [...]

This is the Assassin’s Creed game you’ve been waiting for. Let’s just get that out of the way now. Assassin’s Creed III is an appropriate title because this is more a sequel to Assassin’s Creed II than Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. In fact, production began on this game before Revelations was even a thing, which is [...]

You wake up drunk and everything has already gone to hell. This is how Dead Island begins, both the demo at PAX and the final game itself. Sadly, the intro doesn’t change depending on which character you start as, but that doesn’t mean they’re indistinguishable from each other. The demo forces me to play as [...]

Before the demo starts, Steve Gibson of Gearbox reassures all of us in the room that Borderlands 2 isn’t just a quick, cash-in sequel; and the fact that it’s not coming out until “fiscal year 2013” certainly supports that claim. After watching the demo, I’m fully convinced: Gearbox is keeping what works while changing what’s familiar, [...]